Apple Music still has ‘homework’ to do to work out kinks, says key executive

In a new interview, an Apple Music exec admits that the service has its work cut out for itself to fully satisfy users. While the service has a amassed a reported 11 million subscribers since it launched at the end of June with a three-month free trial, many have complained about its confusing user interface and compatibility issues with iTunes.

iTunes International vp Oliver Schusser explained to the Guardian that the Apple Music team is still working out kinks ahead of its launch on Android and Sonos systems this fall.

“There’s a lot of work going into making the product better,” he said. “Our focus is on editorial and playlists, and obviously we have teams all around the world working on that, but we’re also adding features and cleaning up certain things.”

For some longtime iTunes users, upgrading to iTunes 12.2 and syncing their music library with iCloud caused significant problems. When asked about the problems, Schusser gave a rather boilerplate response. “The product is always our priority, and we are getting a lot of feedback … We’re obviously trying to make it better every day,” he told the Guardian. He did acknowledge that developing Apple Music is a constant learning process, though. “We still have a bit of homework to be done for the rest of the year.”

Even as users decide to stream music via Apple Music rather than download songs from the iTunes music store, Schusser said that iTunes remains a major focus for the company. “If you follow the industry and look at the numbers, the download business has been really, really healthy. iTunes is a big part of our business, still, and will continue to be, so we focus just as much time and energy on maintaining that, editorially and working on features.”